


The Dark of the Lake

by MercuryGray



Category: Dunkirk (2017)
Genre: Drowning, Espionage, Gen, Military Training, Special Operations Executive, Survival Training, Triggering events
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-10
Updated: 2018-07-10
Packaged: 2019-06-08 03:03:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 911
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15233931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MercuryGray/pseuds/MercuryGray
Summary: People keep joking with Collins that Scotland must feel just like home, but home isn't like this. Home isn't a posh house in the countryside full of people who are teaching you to kill without a sound, and pick locks, and find the best way to blow up a bridge.In the remote Highlands, the Special Operations Executive are trying to turn a pilot into a spy.





	The Dark of the Lake

People keep joking with him that Scotland must feel just like home, but home isn't like this. Home is a semi-detached with a small garden and a coal fire in the front room, not a drafty country house built for the shooting season, with eighteen bedrooms and a park that goes on for miles. Home is small and comfortable and predictable. It's tea at three in the afternoon and a biscuit and a book after supper. Home doesn't have a posh name like Camasdarach, and it isn't full of people who are teaching you to kill without a sound, and pick locks, and find the best way to blow up a bridge.

No, Flying Officer Rob Collins hasn't been home in a very long time, and at the rate he's going, he's doubtful he'll be home again at all.

Funny, how that works - one day the army's mad to leave a country, and the next, they're mad to parachute you back in.

He didn't ask to be assigned to this...this Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, as someone jokingly calls it. But then, no one is really asked - it's more like a very strong recommendation not to say no. He's never quite been sure what his qualifications are, exactly, except for his pilot's wings, and his combat experience at Dunkirk. What was it his CO said? _'A good head on his shoulders.'_

A good head, but not much else. No matter, they said. We'll teach you. Guns, bombs, fuses and timing, morse and wireless operation, radio crystals, antennae placement, dead drops, circuits, alternate routes, cover stories and alibis and cover stories again. Other things, too, secret things, how to be invisible, to move without being seen, to kill without being heard.

One by one other students have left - found wanting in some way, but what that way is no one ever says. They who are left go back to class and do not have time to wonder.

He is almost convinced he will pass, until they give them the lake.

A little place, so little he's not sure it even has a name. Just wide enough to cross, just deep enough that they will have to swim, just warm enough that they should survive.

 _Just a little lake,_ they say.

 _And the Channel's just a little spit of ocean,_ Collins thinks. In his mouth he can still taste the salt, feeling the windscreen against his gloves as it refused to give way. As the lakewater laps around his ankles, his heart remembers the pounding.

From the shore, his classmates are cheering him on. Well, there's no use stopping now. It's only a little lake.

They've given him a log and a pack, disguised using his newly-learned fieldcraft. The water's up to his knees now, mocking him as he wades in. One step, and then another, and then another - maybe they lied, he thinks. Maybe he can walk to the other side.

Then the bottom gives out, and the cold of the lake hits him. His legs churn, searching for the bottom, but it isn't there. Nothing is there. And he is back in the cockpit, and the canopy will not open, and the water is closing in. There is sunlight, but no air.

No ground. No air.

Suddenly there are arms around him, a voice in his ear, soothing and calm, _It's all right, I've got you, back to shore, you're fine, there's a good lad._

It's Smallchurch who's fished him out - one of the women on his course. An officer - Air Auxiliary, maybe? Stronger than she looks, apparently, to drag both him and his pack out of the freezing loch and not let him drag her under. She's soaked to the skin herself, hair plastered onto her face, curls gone, but she's still watching him like a mother hawk, shivering under her blanket with a cup of tea forgotten in her hand as the truck bounces them back to the house. She smiles when he accidentally catches her eye.

"It's the water, isn't it?" It's not really a question. She already knows his truth and is only waiting for him to own it. They teach you to watch people on this course, but Smallchurch, he thinks, was born observant. "One of the officers on my base bailed out over the Channel. Wouldn't go near a bathtub for months after."

Does it matter? "They'll send me home."

"You don't know that. Give it another go this afternoon."

"And if it happens again?" He can still feel the water pressing his chest, his arms beating against an enemy they cannot comprehend.

"I'll just have to come back and drag you out." It's factual, calm - a touch amused. They will send this woman to France, Collins thinks to himself, with her calm smiles and her eyes like the dark of the lake, and she will probably hold a strong man facedown in a bath and drown him when he tries to give her up, his body thrashing as he struggles for breath. When she's done she'll rearrange her hair and reapply her lipstick, and arrange for the body to be found in a canal. But here she will drag a man out of a lake, and smile after, and offer him the solace of a shared truth. _When we leave this place, we will not be us; home will not be home. We will not be different, but we will not be the same._

 

**Author's Note:**

> The Special Operations Executive, or SOE, was an British organization formed during World War Two for the purpose of carrying out espionage and sabotage operations in occupied Europe. They were sometimes called "Irregulars" or "The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare" by Winston Churchill, since some of their combat tactics were learned from guerrilla fighters and gangsters in British colonial possessions. Some of their training material has only recently been made available to the public, and one of their psychological evaluations was, indeed, to make trainees cross a freezing loch with a full pack. (The test was designed to assess their ability to remain calm under pressure.)
> 
> I believe Flying Officer is Collins' official rank in the movie, though it's never mentioned; if you see any pictures of him with his gloves off, you'll notice a single thin band of braid around his cuffs, which could be either the rank insignia for Flying Officer or Pilot Officer (the RAF equivalencies of Lieutenant and Second Lieutenant, respectively.)
> 
> One of SOE's chief aims for recruitment was a deep knowledge of the country in which the agent would operate; since Collins isn't French or Polish, he may be in training for something more like Operation Jedburgh, where SOE agents were sent into France to provide more robust training to resistance groups already operating in the area.
> 
> Of the wartime services, only the SOE allowed women to go into 'frontline' service; a lack of men in France after war-time calls for labor made women less conspicuous than men in some areas of the country. Some of the SOE's most decorated and efficient agents were women like Smallchurch.


End file.
